Thursday, July 10, 2008

We'll See Who Gives The Orders Around Here

I saw Happy Flowers once, on a bill at CBGB's that featured Big Black, Killdozer, and Pussy Galore-- swear to god. Before that, I had bought a half-dozen copies of their "Now We Are Six" EP and gave them away to a bunch of my friends, which didn't make me different, just unpopular.

Actually, my friends all liked Happy Flowers, even my sad-ass hippie new wave friends, which was kinda neat. I think it was because each Happy Flowers song was like a Brady Bunch episode gone wrong: "Mom, I Gave The Cat Some Acid", "The Vacuum Ate Timmy"... the list is almost endless. Back then, MDC and the DK's could bitch all they wanted and you couldn't pay me to listen to them once, but I could crank "Six Pack" and "Young Fast Iranians" all day. Sure, the fact that MDC and DK's wrote crappy songs is part of it, but if you're gonna bitch about something then do us a favor at least be clever about it, and I think that's where bands like Happy Flowers and Drunks With Guns got it right: suburban life is stupid, so here's some noise for noise's sake and let's crack ourselves up thinking about it.

A little side note: I used to buy from Bad Compilation Tapes regularly, which is how I first heard Happy Flowers (on the "Brain of Stone" compilation). Chris from B.C.T. used to say that any band that wanted to send him a song could be on one of his tapes, so ex-hardcore punks Happy Flowers sent in a song that they had cooked up, and presto! Rock history was made. Or something like that.

I'm buddies with Mr. Anus. He has a couple of bands still in the DC area. One of them is called "8-track Jones" which is pretty cool. Go check him out. They play a lot in the Northern Virginia area (Jammin' Java, Galaxy Hut, Wilsons). Tell him Boris Kafka sent you!

Some sort of announcement for 2015 or something

Even though I'm not planning on shutting this blog down just yet, updates will continue to be minimal. Obviously Blogspot has long since kicked the bucket as far as being a useful platform for anyone who's even slightly interested in having other people see the work they're doing and maybe starting a discussion over it. For now, Tumblr has become the place where I've been doing most of my posting as far as bands and photos go, so until Tumblr dies off too, you could skip on over to there if you'd like. Or you can close the browser window and go read a zine, I've heard they've been making a comeback, even though (according to the interviews I've read) Jay Hinman's is the only one that exists so far.

What about me

For the record, I have not only lost my ability to take a joke, but I can also no longer sense danger, communicate with sea animals, see through walls, transform myself into a bucket of water or block of ice, burn a batter's bat to ashes with my fastball, fly an invisible plane, nor start fires and cause seismic waves using only mind control.

Ad policy

The labels that have enough money to buy advertising all put out shitty records

Review policy

If you sent me something I must've lost it

How to use this blog

You can browse this blog and listen to the songs without having to download them first, by clicking on the highlighted song titles. The files will open in a new window; you can either hit "Play", or you can click on "Download" up in the right-hand corner to download them to your computer, which is the preferred method, because there's usually a cool graphic (or sometimes even lyrics) when you play the files using Windows Media Player.

Also, clicking on the photos will enlarged them. I guess some people haven't figured that out yet.

Archive

Bad Writing

"Within a grainy film-still between a summer sunset and the end of times lies the post-punk squall of Weekend. Weekend filter the aggression, tempo and sneer of punk through a wall of reverb, haunting melody, feedback and primitive garage guitar.... a totally distinctive take on the history of post-punk noise rock."

Recent awesome-like stuff from those other blogs

fucking nothing, can you believe that. blogs are dead

This blog was originally intended to be a place for me to write about the records in my collection, regardless of their rarity/collectability-- or, at least, it was when I first started. Lately it's just been an excuse for me to make dumb jokes and spout off about a lot of stupid crap. Sometimes different things will be thrown in along the way just to confuse people and piss them off, which is okay. All screw-ups, wrong dates, and mis-statements will be ignored by me as if they were intentional, except for grammatical errors which will be edited and rewritten at least five or six times if necessary. Facts will often be misrepresented, as a way of mocking those people who think such things are important. Please note: This is just a hobby for me, and bands are written about here either because I own one of their records or because I've seen them play before and like them. Posting press releases for crappy bands that I have no use for is not really how I want to spend my spare time. If you want to know what kind of bands I like, just look at the sidebar to see which bands I've written about already, and you'll notice that your PR firm doesn't represent any of them. Most of the live band photos on this blog are mine, and if there's one of your band that you like then please feel free to use it, I don't care. It's your band anyway. The blog title itself was swiped from Paul Caporino-- "One Base on an Overthrow" was originally going to be the title of a M.O.T.O. record that I was going to release back in the '90s, but that never actually happened. Lucky for you, I guess.